PART SECOND
I
In the conduct of an invented story there are,
no doubt, certain proprieties to be observed for
the sake of clearness and effect. A man of
imagination, however inexperienced in the art of
narrative, has his instinct to guide him in the
choice of his words, and in the development of
the action. A grain of talent excuses many
mistakes. But this is not a work of
imagination; I have no talent; my excuse for
this undertaking lies not in its art, but in its
artlessness. Aware of my limitations and strong
in the sincerity of my purpose, I would not try
(were I able) to invent anything. I push my
scruples so far that I would not even invent a
transition.
Dropping then Mr. Razumov's record at the point
where Councillor Mikulin's question "Where to?"
comes in with the force of an insoluble problem,
I shall simply say that I made the acquaintance
of these ladies about six months before that
time. By "these ladies" I mean, of course, the
mother and the sister of the unfortunate Haldin.
By what arguments he had induced his mother to
sell their little property and go abroad for an
indefinite time, I cannot tell precisely. I
have an idea that Mrs. Haldin, at her son's
wish, would have set fire to her house and
emigrated to the moon without any sign of
surprise or apprehension; and that Miss Haldin--
Nathalie, caressingly Natalka--would have given
her assent to the scheme.
Their proud devotion to that young man became
clear to me in a very short time. Following his
directions they went straight to Switzerland--to
Zurich--where they remained the best part of a
year. From Zurich, which they did not like,
they came to Geneva. A friend of mine in
Lausanne, a lecturer in history at the
University (he had married a Russian lady, a
distant connection of Mrs. Haldin's), wrote to
me suggesting I should call on these ladies. It
was a very kindly meant business suggestion.
Miss Haldin wished to go through a course of
reading the best English authors with a
competent teacher.
Mrs. Haldin received me very kindly. Her bad
French, of which she was smilingly conscious,
did away with the formality of the first
interview. She was a tall woman in a black silk
dress. A wide brow, regular features, and
delicately cut lips, testified to her past
beauty. She sat upright in an easy chair and in
a rather weak, gentle voice told me that her
Natalka simply thirsted after knowledge. Her
thin hands were lying on her lap, her facial
immobility had in it something monachal. "In
Russia," she went on, "all knowledge was tainted
with falsehood. Not chemistry and all that, but
education generally," she explained. The
Government corrupted the teaching for its own
purposes. Both her children felt that. Her
Natalka had obtained a diploma of a Superior
School for Women and her son was a student at
the St. Petersburg University. He had a
brilliant intellect, a most noble unselfish
nature, and he was the oracle of his comrades.
Early next year, she hoped he would join them
and they would then go to Italy together. In
any other country but their own she would have
been certain of a great future for a man with
the extraordinary abilities and the lofty
character of her son--but in Russia. . . .
The young lady sitting by the window turned her
head and said--
"Come, mother. Even with us things change with
years."
Her voice was deep, almost harsh, and yet
caressing in its harshness. She had a dark
complexion, with red lips and a full figure.
She gave the impression of strong vitality. The
old lady sighed.
"You are both young--you two. It is easy for
you to hope. But I, too, am not hopeless.
Indeed, how could I be with a son like this."
I addressed Miss Haldin, asking her what authors
she wished to read. She directed upon me her
grey eyes shaded by black eyelashes, and I
became aware, notwithstanding my years, how
attractive physically her personality could be
to a man capable of appreciating in a woman
something else than the mere grace of
femininity. Her glance was as direct and
trustful as that of a young man yet unspoiled by
the world's wise lessons. And it was intrepid,
but in this intrepidity there was nothing
aggressive. A naive yet thoughtful assurance is
a better definition. She had reflected already
(in Russia the young begin to think early), but
she had never known deception as yet because
obviously she had never yet fallen under the
sway of passion. She was--to look at her was
enough--very capable of being roused by an idea
or simply by a person. At least, so I judged
with I believe an unbiassed mind; for clearly my
person could not be the person--and as to my
ideas!. . .
We became excellent friends in the course of our
reading. It was very pleasant. Without fear of
provoking a smile, I shall confess that I became
very much attached to that young girl. At the
end of four months I told her that now she could
very well go on reading English by herself. It
was time for the teacher to depart. My pupil
looked unpleasantly surprised.
Mrs. Haldin, with her immobility of feature and
kindly expression of the eyes, uttered from her
armchair in her uncertain French, "_Mais l'ami
reviendra._" And so it was settled. I returned-
-not four times a week as before, but pretty
frequently. In the autumn we made some short
excursions together in company with other
Russians. My friendship with these ladies gave
me a standing in the Russian colony which
otherwise I could not have had.
The day I saw in the papers the news of Mr. de P-
--'s assassination--it was a Sunday--I met the
two ladies in the street and walked with them
for some distance. Mrs. Haldin wore a heavy
grey cloak, I remember, over her black silk
dress, and her fine eyes met mine with a very
quiet expression.
"We have been to the late service," she said.
"Natalka came with me. Her girl-friends, the
students here, of course don't. . . . With us
in Russia the church is so identified with
oppression, that it seems almost necessary when
one wishes to be free in this life, to give up
all hope of a future existence. But I cannot
give up praying for my son."
She added with a sort of stony grimness,
colouring slightly, and in French, "_Ce n'est
peut etre qu'une habitude._" ("It may be only
habit.")
Miss Haldin was carrying the prayer-book. She
did not glance at her mother.
"You and Victor are both profound believers,"
she said.
I communicated to them the news from their
country which I had just read in a cafe. For a
whole minute we walked together fairly briskly
in silence. Then Mrs. Haldin murmured--
"There will be more trouble, more persecutions
for this. They may be even closing the
University. There is neither peace nor rest in
Russia for one but in the grave.
"Yes. The way is hard," came from the daughter,
looking straight before her at the Chain of Jura
covered with snow, like a white wall closing the
end of the street. "But concord is not so very
far off."
"That is what my children think," observed Mrs.
Haldin to me.
I did not conceal my feeling that these were
strange times to talk of concord. Nathalie
Haldin surprised me by saying, as if she had
thought very much on the subject, that the
occidentals did not understand the situation.
She was very calm and youthfully superior.
"You think it is a class conflict, or a conflict
of interests, as social contests are with you in
Europe. But it is not that at all. It is
something quite different."
"It is quite possible that I don't understand,"
I admitted.
That propensity of lifting every problem from
the plane of the understandable by means of some
sort of mystic expression, is very Russian. I
knew her well enough to have discovered her
scorn for all the practical forms of political
liberty known to the western world. I suppose
one must be a Russian to understand Russian
simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in
which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless
cynicism. I think sometimes that the
psychological secret of the profound difference
of that people consists in this, that they
detest life, the irremediable life of the earth
as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with
perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental
value. But this is a digression indeed. . . .
I helped these ladies into the tramcar and they
asked me to call in the afternoon. At least
Mrs. Haldin asked me as she climbed up, and her
Natalka smiled down at the dense westerner
indulgently from the rear platform of the moving
car. The light of the clear wintry forenoon was
softened in her grey eyes.
Mr. Razumov's record, like the open book of
fate, revives for me the memory of that day as
something startlingly pitiless in its freedom
from all forebodings. Victor Haldin was still
with the living, but with the living whose only
contact with life is the expectation of death.
He must have been already referring to the last
of his earthly affections, the hours of that
obstinate silence, which for him was to be
prolonged into eternity. That afternoon the
ladies entertained a good many of their
compatriots--more than was usual for them to
receive at one time; and the drawing-room on the
ground floor of a large house on the Boulevard
des Philosophes was very much crowded.
I outstayed everybody; and when I rose Miss
Haldin stood up too. I took her hand and was
moved to revert to that morning's conversation
in the street.
"Admitting that we occidentals do not understand
the character of your. . . ." I began.
It was as if she had been prepared for me by
some mysterious fore-knowledge. She checked me
gently--
"Their impulses--their. . . " she sought the
proper expression and found it, but in French. .
." their _mouvements d'ame._"
Her voice was not much above a whisper.
"Very well," I said. " But still we are looking
at a conflict. You say it is not a conflict of
classes and not a conflict of interests.
Suppose I admitted that. Are antagonistic ideas
then to be reconciled more easily--can they be
cemented with blood and violence into that
concord which you proclaim to be so near?"
She looked at me searchingly with her clear grey
eyes, without answering my reasonable question--
my obvious, my unanswerable question.
"It is inconceivable," I added, with something
like annoyance.
"Everything is inconceivable," she said. "The
whole world is inconceivable to the strict logic
of ideas. And yet the world exists to our
senses, and we exist in it. There must be a
necessity superior to our conceptions. It is a
very miserable and a very false thing to belong
to the majority. We Russians shall find some
better form of national freedom than an
artificial conflict of parties--which is wrong
because it is a conflict and contemptible
because it is artificial. It is left for us
Russians to discover a better way."
Mrs. Haldin had been looking out of the window.
She turned upon me the almost lifeless beauty of
her face, and the living benign glance of her
big dark eyes.
"That's what my children think," she declared.
"I suppose," I addressed Miss Haldin, "that you
will be shocked if I tell you that I haven't
understood--I won't say a single word; I've
understood all the words. . . . But what can be
this era of disembodied concord you are looking
forward to. Life is a thing of form. It has
its plastic shape and a definite intellectual
aspect. The most idealistic conceptions of love
and forbearance must be clothed in flesh as it
were before they can be made understandable."
I took my leave of Mrs. Haldin, whose beautiful
lips never stirred. She smiled with her eyes
only. Nathalie Haldin went with me as far as
the door, very amiable.
"Mother imagines that I am the slavish echo of
my brother Victor. It is not so. He
understands me better than I can understand him.
When he joins us and you come to know him you
will see what an exceptional soul it is." She
paused. "He is not a strong man in the
conventional sense, you know," she added. "But
his character is without a flaw"
"I believe that it will not be difficult for me
to make friends with your brother Victor."
"Don't expect to understand him quite," she
said, a little maliciously. "He is not at all--
at all--western at bottom."
And on this unnecessary warning I left the room
with another bow in the doorway to Mrs. Haldin
in her armchair by the window. The shadow of
autocracy all unperceived by me had already
fallen upon the Boulevard des Philosophes, in
the free, independent and democratic city of
Geneva, where there is a quarter called "La
Petite Russie." Whenever two Russians come
together, the shadow of autocracy is with them,
tinging their thoughts, their views, their most
intimate feelings, their private life, their
public utterances--haunting the secret of their
silences.
What struck me next in the course of a week or
so was the silence of these ladies. I used to
meet them walking in the public garden near the
University. They greeted me with their usual
friendliness, but I could not help noticing
their taciturnity. By that time it was
generally known that the assassin of M. de P---
had been caught, judged, and executed. So much
had been declared officially to the news
agencies. But for the world at large he
remained anonymous. The official secrecy had
withheld his name from the public. I really
cannot imagine for what reason.
One day I saw Miss Haldin walking alone in the
main valley of the Bastions under the naked
trees.
"Mother is not very well," she explained.
As Mrs.Haldin had, it seemed, never had a day's
illness in her life, this indisposition was
disquieting. It was nothing definite, too.
"I think she is fretting because we have not
heard from my brother for rather a long time."
"No news--good news," I said cheerfully, and we
began to walk slowly side by side.
"Not in Russia," she breathed out so low that I
only just caught the words. I looked at her
with more attention.
"You too are anxious? "
She admitted after a moment of hesitation that
she was.
"It is really such a long time since we heard. .
. ."
And before I could offer the usual banal
suggestions she confided in me.
"Oh! But it is much worse than that. I wrote
to a family we know in Petersburg. They had not
seen him for more than a month. They thought he
was already with us. They were even offended a
little that he should have left Petersburg
without calling on them. The husband of the
lady went at once to his lodgings. Victor had
left there and they did not know his address."
I remember her catching her breath rather
pitifully. Her brother had not been seen at
lectures for a very long time either. He only
turned up now and then at the University gate to
ask the porter for his letters. And the
gentleman friend was told that the student
Haldin did not come to claim the last two
letters for him. But the police came to inquire
if the student Haldin ever received any
correspondence at the University and took them
away.
"My two last letters," she said.
We faced each other. A few snow-flakes
fluttered under the naked boughs. The sky was
dark.
"What do you think could have happened?" I
asked.
Her shoulders moved slightly.
"One can never tell--in Russia."
I saw then the shadow of autocracy lying upon
Russian lives in their submission or their
revolt. I saw it touch her handsome open face
nestled in a fur collar and darken her clear
eyes that shone upon me brilliantly grey in the
murky light of a beclouded, inclement afternoon.
"Let us move on," she said." It is cold
standing--to-day."
She shuddered a little and stamped her little
feet. We moved briskly to the end of the alley
and back to the great gates of the garden.
"Have you told your mother? " I ventured to ask.
"No. Not yet. I came out to walk off the
impression of this letter."
I heard a rustle of paper somewhere. It came
from her muff. She had the letter with her in
there.
"What is it that you are afraid of?" I asked.
To us Europeans of the West, all ideas of
political plots and conspiracies seem childish,
crude inventions for the theatre or a novel. I
did not like to be more definite in my inquiry.
"For us--for my mother specially, what I am
afraid of is incertitude. People do disappear.
Yes, they do disappear. I leave you to imagine
what it is--the cruelty of the dumb weeks--
months--years! This friend of ours has
abandoned his inquiries when he heard of the
police getting hold of the letters. I suppose
he was afraid of compromising himself. He has a
wife and children--and why should he, after all.
. . . Moreover, he is without influential
connections and not rich. What could he do?. .
. Yes, I am afraid of silence--for my poor
mother. She won't be able to bear it. For my
brother I am afraid of. . ." she became almost
indistinct, "of anything."
We were now near the gate opposite the theatre.
She raised her voice.
"But lost people do turn up even in Russia. Do
you know what my last hope is? Perhaps the next
thing we know, we shall see him walking into our
rooms."
I raised my hat and she passed out of the
gardens, graceful and strong, after a slight
movement of the head to me, her hands in the
muff, crumpling the cruel Petersburg letter.
On returning home I opened the newspaper I
receive from London, and glancing down the
correspondence from Russia--not the telegrams
but the correspondence--the first thing that
caught my eye was the name of Haldin. Mr. de P--
-'s death was no longer an actuality, but the
enterprising correspondent was proud of having
ferreted out some unofficial information about
that fact of modern history. He had got hold of
Haldin's name, and had picked up the story of
the midnight arrest in the street. But the
sensation from a journalistic point of view was
already well in the past. He did not allot to
it more than twenty lines out of a full column.
It was quite enough to give me a sleepless
night. I perceived that it would have been a
sort of treason to let Miss Haldin come without
preparation upon that journalistic discovery
which would infallibly be reproduced on the
morrow by French and Swiss newspapers. I had a
very bad time of it till the morning, wakeful
with nervous worry and night-marish with the
feeling of being mixed up with something
theatrical and morbidly affected. The
incongruity of such a complication in those two
women's lives was sensible to me all night in
the form of absolute anguish. It seemed due to
their refined simplicity that it should remain
concealed from them for ever. Arriving at an
unconscionably early hour at the door of their
apartment, I felt as if I were about to commit
an act of vandalism. . . .
The middle-aged servant woman led me into the
drawing-room where there was a duster on a chair
and a broom leaning against the centre table.
The motes danced in the sunshine; I regretted I
had not written a letter instead of coming
myself, and was thankful for the brightness of
the day. Miss Haldin in a plain black dress
came lightly out of her mother's room with a
fixed uncertain smile on her lips.
I pulled the paper out of my pocket. I did not
imagine that a number of the _Standard_ could
have the effect of Medusa's head. Her face went
stony in a moment--her eyes--her limbs. The
most terrible thing was that being stony she
remained alive. One was conscious of her
palpitating heart. I hope she forgave me the
delay of my clumsy circumlocution. It was not
very prolonged; she could not have kept so still
from head to foot for more than a second or two;
and then I heard her draw a breath. As if the
shock had paralysed her moral resistance, and
affected the firmness of her muscles, the
contours of her face seemed to have given way.
She was frightfully altered. She looked aged--
ruined. But only for a moment. She said with
decision--
"I am going to tell my mother at once."
"Would that be safe in her state?" I objected.
"What can be worse than the state she has been
in for the last month? We understand this in
another way. The crime is not at his door.
Don't imagine I am defending him before you."
She went to the bedroom door, then came back to
ask me in a low murmur not to go till she
returned. For twenty interminable minutes not a
sound reached me. At last Miss Haldin came out
and walked across the room with her quick light
step. When she reached the armchair she dropped
into it heavily as if completely exhausted.
Mrs. Haldin, she told me, had not shed a tear.
She was sitting up in bed, and her immobility,
her silence, were very alarming. At last she
lay down gently and had motioned her daughter
away.
"She will call me in presently," added Miss
Haldin. "I left a bell near the bed."
I confess that my very real sympathy had no
standpoint. The Western readers for whom this
story is written will understand what I mean.
It was, if I may say so, the want of experience.
Death is a remorseless spoliator. The anguish
of irreparable loss is familiar to us all.
There is no life so lonely as to be safe against
that experience. But the grief I had brought to
these two ladies had gruesome associations. It
had the associations of bombs and gallows--a
lurid, Russian colouring which made the
complexion of my sympathy uncertain.
I was grateful to Miss Haldin for not
embarrassing me by an outward display of deep
feeling. I admired her for that wonderful
command over herself, even while I was a little
frightened at it. It was the stillness of a
great tension. What if it should suddenly snap?
Even the door of Mrs. Haldin's room, with the
old mother alone in there, had a rather awful
aspect.
Nathalie Haldin murmured sadly--
"I suppose you are wondering what my feelings
are?"
Essentially that was true. It was that very
wonder which unsettled my sympathy of a dense
Occidental. I could get hold of nothing but of
some commonplace phrases, those futile phrases
that give the measure of our impotence before
each other's trials I mumbled something to the
effect that, for the young, life held its hopes
and compensations. It held duties too--but of
that I was certain it was not necessary to
remind her.
She had a handkerchief in her hands and pulled
at it nervously.
"I am not likely to forget my mother," she said.
"We used to be three. Now we are two--two
women. She's not so very old. She may live
quite a long time yet. What have we to look for
in the future ? For what hope and what
consolation?"
"You must take a wider view," I said resolutely,
thinking that with this exceptional creature
this was the right note to strike. She looked
at me steadily for a moment, and then the tears
she had been keeping down flowed unrestrained.
She jumped up and stood in the window with her
back to me.
I slipped away without attempting even to
approach her. Next day I was told at the door
that Mrs. Haldin was better. The middle-aged
servant remarked that a lot of people--Russians--
had called that day, but Miss Haldin bad not
seen anybody. A fortnight later, when making my
daily call, I was asked in and found Mrs. Haldin
sitting in her usual place by the window.
At first one would have thought that nothing was
changed. I saw across the room the familiar
profile, a little sharper in outline and
overspread by a uniform pallor as might have
been expected in an invalid. But no disease
could have accounted for the change in her black
eyes, smiling no longer with gentle irony. She
raised them as she gave me her hand. I observed
the three weeks' old number of the _Standard_
folded with the correspondence from Russia
uppermost, lying on a little table by the side
of the armchair. Mrs. Haldin's voice was
startlingly weak and colourless. Her first
words to me framed a question.
"Has there been anything more in papers?"
I released her long emaciated hand, shook my
head negatively, and sat down.
"The English press is wonderful. Nothing can be
kept secret from it, and all the world must
hear. Only our Russian news is not always easy
to understand. Not always easy. . . . But
English mothers do not look for news like that.
. . ."
She laid her hand on the newspaper and took it
away again. I said--
"We too have had tragic times in our history."
"A long time ago. A very long time ago."
"Yes."
"There are nations that have made their bargain
with fate," said Miss Haldin, who had approached
us. "We need not envy them."
"Why this scorn?" I asked gently. "It may be
that our bargain was not a very lofty one. But
the terms men and nations obtain from Fate are
hallowed by the price."
Mrs. Haldin turned her head away and looked out
of the window for a time, with that new, sombre,
extinct gaze of her sunken eyes which so
completely made another woman of her.
"That Englishman, this correspondent," she
addressed me suddenly, "do you think it is
possible that he knew my son?"
To this strange question I could only say that
it was possible of course. She saw my surprise.
"If one knew what sort of man he was one could
perhaps write to him," she murmured.
"Mother thinks," explained Miss Haldin, standing
between us, with one hand resting on the back of
my chair, "that my poor brother perhaps did not
try to save himself."
I looked up at Miss Haldin in sympathetic
consternation, but Miss Haldin was looking down
calmly at her mother. The latter said--
"We do not know the address of any of his
friends. Indeed, we know nothing of his
Petersburg comrades. He had a multitude of
young friends, only he never spoke much of them.
One could guess that they were his disciples
and that they idolized him. But he was so
modest. One would think that with so many
devoted. . . ."
She averted her head again and looked down the
Boulevard des Philosophes, a singularly arid and
dusty thoroughfare, where nothing could be seen
at the moment but two dogs, a little girl in a
pinafore hopping on one leg, and in the distance
a workman wheeling a bicycle.
"Even amongst the Apostles of Christ there was
found a Judas," she whispered as if to herself,
but with the evident intention to be heard by me.
The Russian visitors assembled in little knots,
conversed amongst themselves meantime, in low
murmurs, and with brief glances in our
direction. It was a great contrast to the usual
loud volubility of these gatherings. Miss
Haldin followed me into the ante-room.
"People will come," she said. "We cannot shut
the door in their faces."
While I was putting on my overcoat she began to
talk to me of her mother. Poor Mrs. Haldin was
fretting after more news. She wanted to go on
hearing about her unfortunate son. She could
not make up her mind to abandon him quietly to
the dumb unknown. She would persist in pursuing
him in there through the long days of motionless
silence face to face with the empty Boulevard
des Philosophes. She could not understand why
he had not escaped--as so many other
revolutionists and conspirators had managed to
escape in other instances of that kind. It was
really inconceivable that the means of secret
revolutionary organisations should have failed
so inexcusably to preserve her son. But in
reality the inconceivable that staggered her
mind was nothing but the cruel audacity of Death
passing over her head to strike at that young
and precious heart.
Miss Haldin mechanically, with an absorbed look,
handed me my hat. I understood from her that
the poor woman was possessed by the sombre and
simple idea that her son must have perished
because he did not want to be saved. It could
not have been that he despaired of his country's
future. That was impossible. Was it possible
that his mother and sister had not known how to
merit his confidence; and that, after having
done what he was compelled to do, his spirit
became crushed by an intolerable doubt, his mind
distracted by a sudden mistrust.
I was very much shocked by this piece of
ingenuity.
"Our three lives were like that!" Miss Haldin
twined the fingers of both her hands together in
demonstration, then separated them slowly,
looking straight into my face. "That's what
poor mother found to torment herself and me
with, for all the years to come," added the
strange girl. At that moment her indefinable
charm was revealed to me in the conjunction of
passion and stoicism. I imagined what her life
was likely to be by the side of Mrs. Haldin's
terrible immobility, inhabited by that fixed
idea. But my concern was reduced to silence by
my ignorance of her modes of feeling.
Difference of nationality is a terrible obstacle
for our complex Western natures. But Miss
Haldin probably was too simple to suspect my
embarrassment. She did not wait for me to say
anything, but as if reading my thoughts on my
face she went on courageously--
"At first poor mother went numb, as our peasants
say; then she began to think and she will go on
now thinking and thinking in that unfortunate
strain. You see yourself how cruel that is. . .
."
I never spoke with greater sincerity than when I
agreed with her that it would be deplorable in
the highest degree. She took an anxious breath.
"But all these strange details in the English
paper," she exclaimed suddenly. "What is the
meaning of them? I suppose they are true? But
is it not terrible that my poor brother should
be caught wandering alone, as if in despair,
about the streets at night. . . ."
We stood so close to each other in the dark
anteroom that I could see her biting her lower
lip to suppress a dry sob. After a short pause
she said--
"I suggested to mother that he may have been
betrayed by some false friend or simply by some
cowardly creature. It may be easier for her to
believe that."
I understood now the poor woman's whispered
allusion to Judas.
"It may be easier," I admitted, admiring
inwardly the directness and the subtlety of the
girl's outlook. She was dealing with life as it
was made for her by the political conditions of
her country. She faced cruel realities, not
morbid imaginings of her own making. I could
not defend myself from a certain feeling of
respect when she added simply--
"Time they say can soften every sort of
bitterness. But I cannot believe that it has
any power over remorse. It is better that
mother should think some person guilty of
Victor's death, than that she should connect it
with a weakness of her son or a shortcoming of
her own."
"But you, yourself, don't suppose that. . . ."
I began.
She compressed her lips and shook her head. She
harboured no evil thoughts against any one, she
declared--and perhaps nothing that happened was
unnecessary. On these words, pronounced low and
sounding mysterious in the half obscurity of the
ante-room, we parted with an expressive and warm
handshake. The grip of her strong, shapely hand
had a seductive frankness, a sort of exquisite
virility. I do not know why she should have
felt so friendly to me. It may be that she
thought I understood her much better than I was
able to do. The most precise of her sayings
seemed always to me to have enigmatical
prolongations vanishing somewhere beyond my
reach. I am reduced to suppose that she
appreciated my attention and my silence. The
attention she could see was quite sincere, so
that the silence could not be suspected of
coldness. It seemed to satisfy her. And it is
to be noted that if she confided in me it was
clearly not with the expectation of receiving
advice, for which, indeed she never asked.
